The Plan

What happens when you decide to leave a steady job, with no firm plans for what to do next, but the general desire to try to generate and grow a business idea from an initial flicker of a concept into something that at least provides enough income to live off? This is the question I am trying to answer, and the journey I am planning to document over the next six to twelve months.

An Introduction

So who am I? A software engineer and engineering manager, based near Dublin, Ireland, who has spent the last 20 years working for a number of well-known companies to build mostly media and television related software. This has been an interesting career, during which time I’ve learned a lot about designing and building large (and small) software systems, how software teams collaborate and interact with each other; and many of the things that can accelerate or inhibit software projects.
Over the last few months I’ve been evaluating my career to-date, and have come to a couple of conclusions:

• That the thing I most enjoy about software development is actually designing and implementing the software itself; whereas over the last few years I have spent much more time managing teams and processes rather than actually building software. I’ve realised that I don’t feel ready at this stage in my career to completely turn my back on the software development craft I actually trained for and solely focus on management.
• That over the last few years I’ve built loads of prototypes and side projects in my spare time, but have never had the time or energy at weekends to take them anywhere near the point where they could be productized, and that this has been a recurring source of frustration for me.
• That my dream, for most of the 20 years I have been working in the industry, has been to set up my own venture; but that my day job has always got in the way; and that if I don’t do it now, when am I realistically ever going to do it?

So with the above in mind, I have taken the plunge, quit my job, and given myself six months to re-focus back on building software and developing ideas with a view to starting a company. I’m looking at this as an experiment, which at the very least gives me a chance to get back into coding and serious software development, and to learn some of the technologies that I’ve been wanting to play with for some time but have just never had the chance.

To keep things focused I have set the following initial objectives for myself. I am sure that these will change over time, but they give me something to start with:

1. Dive deeply back into software design and development: re-sharpen my software skills, re-acquaint myself with programming languages and platforms I used regularly in the past; and extend my knowledge and skills across relevant modern technologies and software techniques that I haven’t had a chance to use up to this point.
2. Brainstorm, explore, ideate and iterate towards a viable business idea that meets the criteria of being something that I would be happy to work on for at least the next five years (I will expand on this criteria in later posts). I am giving myself six months to reach a point where I have a prototyped concept that passes a set of viability tests (more on these later, too). If at this time no such idea exists, then I start sending out CVs and applying for jobs. If, however, I have something that looks like it has potential, then I will give myself more time to develop it further.
3. Learn how to start-up and run a company. At the moment I am very consciously ignorant of how to do this. Beyond a ‘Starting Your Own Business’ course at university twenty-one years ago I have zero training in trying to set up a business; and so I am looking to educate myself, reach out to others for help, and hopefully find one or more mentors who can help me in this journey, and stop me from either completely screwing up, or squandering my efforts.
4. Have fun!! I have enjoyed many aspects of my career up to this point immensely, but for the most part it has been a serious business, developing things in a serious manner. Way beyond the simple fact that for at least the next few months I am going to be able to go at my own pace, along the path I decide; I believe that keeping things fun, with a sense of excitement and impulsivity, will aid my creativity and productivity. At the same time I think it will give me more insight into how to manage the paradox of software development, in the sense that it is inherently creative, and at its most effective when a developer and development team is given the freedom to do what they want; whilst at the same time that creativity is constrained and inhibited by deadlines, legacy software and existing architecture.
5. Spend some time thinking about what makes software development work well, and what impedes it. There are lots of different methodologies and schools of thought around how to plan, design and implement software effectively; but experience has shown me that even with a willing and informed organisation there is often the feeling that the development team is not working to what should be its potential. To me this is illustrated most clearly when I’ve taken part in hackathons, and seen the same team of people achieve more in 24 hours than they would normally be able to achieve in several weeks using the ‘normal’ development process. Whilst I know that there are constraints and factors present in day-to-day product development that don’t exist in a hackathon, I am still convinced that there are ways of executing product-quality software development whilst maintaining the immediacy and energy of a hackathon or rapid prototyping; and so this is a concept I want to explore over the coming months.
   6) Document my progress. That is where this blog comes in. At the very least it will help me keep a record of what I’ve done and the thought processes I’ve gone through. It may catalogue a comedy of errors; or (as I hope) it may also document a journey that achieves at least some of the goals above, and passes some interesting points along the way. I guess time will tell…

So there you have it. Today is day zero, the last day of the bank holiday weekend after leaving my job. Tomorrow the journey begins…